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en'Blackhat' fails to compute as a great thrillerhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/blackhat-fails-to-compute-as-a-great-thriller
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/blackhat3.jpg" title="From left,Chris Hemsworth, Tang Wei and Holt McCallany in &quot;Blackhat.&quot;" class="colorbox" rel="gallery-285"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/blackhat3.jpg" alt="" title="From left,Chris Hemsworth, Tang Wei and Holt McCallany in &quot;Blackhat.&quot;" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>I used to think algorithms had something to do with Caribbean music, blissfully unaware they were crucial to computers, let alone terrorism. Now, alas, with Kim Jong Un and Sony ’n’ at, we must all get with the online program of 21st-century warfare, which threatens to destroy society as we know and love-hate it.</p>
<p>If anyone can do razzle-dazzle justice to Cybercrime &amp; Punishment, it’s “Miami Vice” maestro Michael Mann, whose “Blackhat” thriller opens with a malware computer RAT (Remote Access Tool) triggering an attack on a huge Hong Kong nuclear power plant. The result is chaos and a near-meltdown.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">Simultaneously, somebody hacks into the Chicago Mercantile Trade Exchange’s system, sends soy futures skyrocketing through the roof and makes off with half a billion well-laundered bucks. Is there a connection? Bouncing their malware off proxy servers to stay invisible, the perpetrators and their motives are unknown — and something much more heinous is in the works.</span></p>
<p>This is a case for brilliant hacker Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), except that Nick is doing 5-to-15 in a federal pen for some too-brilliant hacking in the past. Parts of the evil malware code have been traced to one he wrote in his youth, so — in a rare instance of cooperation — the American and Chinese governments join to spring him in exchange for his expertise. Assignment: to out-hack and identify the uberhacker in order to preserve his own and Western civilization’s survival.</p>
<p>It’s Eastern civilization’s survival, too, for which he’ll be relying on Chen (Leehom Wang), the chief of China’s cyberdefense team — and Nick’s old roommate at MIT — as well as Chen’s sister Lien (Wei Tang), a ’Net engineer whose brilliance complements Nick’s and who provides more than the usual cardboard love interest. Normally in such thrillers, it’s the girl’s job to provide one hot sex scene and then get in the way and need to be rescued. In this one, she and the boy have a real relationship that develops sexily.</p>
<p>Mr. Hemsworth (of “The Avengers” and “Thor” series fame) has serious sex appeal himself — a kind of buffed Brad Pitt with the mumbly diffidence of James Dean — but he’s no computer geek in appearance. I mean, how hard would it have been to give him glasses taped together in the middle for just a hint of nerdiness? Macho ain't mucho if you don't have a little something more. Or less.</p>
<p>Viola Davis (Oscar-nominated for “The Help” and star of TV’s “How to Get Away With Murder”) is fine as FBI Special Agent Barrett, despite a characteristically bad wig. Pittsburgh’s own Christian Borle (fresh from playing Smee opposite Christopher Walken’s Hook in the live TV “Peter Pan”) is a pleasant surprise in his small info-tech role.</p>
<p>The film’s bad title refers to villains in old Western movies who were always identifiable by their black hats — in this case, hackers who commit cybercrimes for money or sheer malice. The story was inspired by the Stuxnet “weaponized” computer worm, jointly designed by the U.S. and Israel, that wreaked havoc on Iran's nuclear centrifuges and uranium enrichment facilities in 2010.</p>
<p>Give director Mann credit for injecting no more computer gibberish than necessary — and followable — by old fogies like me. Mirabile dictu, his characters never need to log on to their laptops or endure slow connections. They’ve got instant Wi-Fi any time, any place, in subterranean Malaysian storm drains or on the run.</p>
<p>Give him credit, too, for terrific atmospherics: Mr. Mann loves urban landscapes, especially at night, and you can feel — almost smell — the thick, languid air and nifty Hong Kong harbor houseboat lights.</p>
<p>The trouble with this new breed of cybercrooks is that key-clicking doesn’t quicken the viewer’s pulse, and their nefarious activities aren’t intrinsically photogenic. Mr. Mann loves shootouts (don’t we all?), and virtual ones on a laptop don’t cut it. His compelling pyrotechnics are sparing, never stupidly excessive — but his default reliance is on TV devices: overlong chase scenes, requiring Dramamine to endure his “Miami Vice”-like grip on hand-held camera shots.</p>
<p>Those slick skills are in service here of a flawed script by Morgan Davis Foehl. He and Mr. Mann worked extensively with ex-cybercriminals and police to produce it. But how could someone so attentive to verisimilitude and techno details pay so little attention to basic credulity? Some 3,000 extras were employed for the film’s climactic grand finale in Jakarta. It is visually stunning — and stunningly disingenuous. The revelation of the villains’ identity and ultimate objective is less an “Aha!” than a “Huh?” moment.</p>
<p>“Blackhat” is stylishly entertaining, but it’s no “Heat” (1995) or “Insider” (1999) — Mr. Mann’s previous gems. The fact of its early January release-dumping speaks volumes. He has tried but nobly failed to make the new cutting-edge cyber film.</p>
<p>Come to think of it, there still hasn’t been a better computer crime-thriller in the 47 years since Stanley Kubrick’s “2001.”</p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris can be reached at <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Sat, 16 Jan 2016 05:00:00 +0000285 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/blackhat-fails-to-compute-as-a-great-thriller#comments'Merchants of Doubt' shows how to do battle on major issueshttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/merchants-of-doubt-shows-how-to-do-battle-on-major-issues
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/merchantsofdoubt.jpg" title="&#039;Merchants of Doubt&#039; shows how to do battle on major issues" class="colorbox" rel="gallery-267"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/merchantsofdoubt.jpg" alt="" title="" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>There’s no doubt that asbestos and cigarettes cause lung cancer.</p>
<p>There’s no doubt that DDT kills wildlife.</p>
<p>There’s no doubt about the existence of acid rain and holes in the ozone layer.</p>
<p>There’s no doubt that the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves have shrunk by 23 percent.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">There’s no doubt that man-produced carbon dioxide has exponentially aggravated the greenhouse effect.</span></p>
<p>Irrefutable scientific data and photographic evidence now confirm all of the above. But there was a time when they didn’t.</p>
<p>What do you do when such data and evidence debunk your ideological beliefs? When there’s truly no doubt?</p>
<p>You sow it.</p>
<p>That’s the premise and political tactic that documentary director Robert Kenner (Oscar-nominated for “Food Inc.” in 2009) explores in “Merchants of Doubt,” an expose of the pundits-for-hire who pose as scientific authorities on such issues as toxic chemicals, pharmaceuticals and climate change.</p>
<p>Their genesis dates from the 1950s with the initial full-throated (pardon the adjective) defense of tobacco: “Nicotine is not addictive and smoking doesn’t cause cancer.” As research data showed otherwise, the defense modulated to: “It is not known whether smoking causes cancer” and then “There is no conclusive proof.”</p>
<p>That approach — backed by a billion-dollar public relations campaign to promote it — staved off government action/regulation for the better part of half a century, while other toxic industries took notice: If it worked for tobacco, why not for us?</p>
<p>The playbook: Deny the problem, call for more evidence, cherry-pick data, create front groups to raise concerns about threatened freedoms, hire media-friendly “experts” to promulgate disinformation and mislead the public (an easy-enough task).</p>
<p>Rather than develop a self-extinguishing cigarette, for example, the tobacco and chemical industries joined to fund “Citizens for Fire Safety,” a front group that paid doctors tens of thousands of dollars to invent crib-fire horror stories for congressional committees on behalf of the world’s three largest flame-retardant companies.</p>
<p>The Big Issue nowadays, of course, is climate change and the industry-funded campaigns to convince Americans that global warming is “a hoax” lacking scientific consensus. In fact, the science is conclusive. Don’t take it from me or filmmaker Kenner. Take it from George H.W. Bush: “Global warming is real, man-made and potentially catastrophic.” Newt Gingrich, John Boehner and Mitt Romney all said the same — until the Tea Party’s rise in 2008. Now they say, “We don’t know....”</p>
<p>Bottom line: You don’t need to prove or disprove anything to muck up the issue. You just need to confuse. You don’t have to win the debate — you just have to keep it going. A classic example, Mr. Kenner argues, is the so-called “Oregon Petition,” allegedly signed by 31,000 scientists and engineers denying climate change. Although long since discredited, it is endlessly cited and perpetuated on the Internet by the right-wing blogosphere and conservative think tanks —- such as Americans for Prosperity and the Cato Institute — funded by the Koch brothers.</p>
<p>America's spin factory is full of professional fabricators and obfuscators on both sides of the political fence, who have muddled the climate-change debate. But Mr. Kenner says it’s the right, rather than the left, that has been remarkably effective at creating scientific controversy where none exists.</p>
<p>In any case, regardless of left or right, you can't “reason” people out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, and most people are less interested in “the truth” than in confirming their predisposed biases. There’s a debate, all right, but it’s not about science, it’s about politics.</p>
<p>Mr. Kenner’s use of magician Jamy Ian Swiss as a framing device for his film is a bit too precious, although the intended parallel is apt: The magician’s techniques of distraction and confusion are similar to the global-warming spinmeister’s.</p>
<p>Based on a revelatory investigative book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, this documentary’s slick production values boost it above Michael Moore’s in-your-face docs but leave Mr. Kenner open to similar over-polemical charges. Not to mention his over-emotional ending. He’s preaching (largely) to his own choir. But it is fascinating as well as factual.</p>
<p>Most fascinating factoid, for me, in “Merchants of Doubt” is that the Arctic is warmer now than it has been in 40,000 years. Which relates to an irony revealed in the film: Exxon-Mobil was engaged in new drilling there — in a joint operation with Russia — using the latest sophisticated climate-change data, even as they’re denying it!</p>
<p>Opens today at the Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill only.</p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris can be reached at <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Fri, 24 Apr 2015 15:31:28 +0000267 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/merchants-of-doubt-shows-how-to-do-battle-on-major-issues#comments'Queen and Country' charmingly captures English life in the 1950shttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/queen-and-country-charmingly-captures-english-life-in-the-1950s
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/queenandcountry.jpg" title="Callum Turner and Vanessa Kirby in &quot;Queen and Country.&quot;" class="colorbox" rel="gallery-268"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/queenandcountry.jpg" alt="" title="Callum Turner and Vanessa Kirby in &quot;Queen and Country.&quot;" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></p>
<p>It takes a successful Hollywood film about 15 — maybe 20 — minutes to generate a sequel. In England, the gestation period for a really good sequel of a really good film tends to be much longer — in writer-director John Boorman’s case, 28 years.</p>
<p>Mr. Boorman’s beautiful “Hope and Glory” (nominated for five Oscars in 1987) was the semiautobiographical tale of 9-year-old Billy’s premature coming-of-age in London during the World War II Blitz. That exhilarating time of adventure, danger and upheaval culminates in sheer joy when an errant Luftwaffe bomb blows up his school.</p>
<p>“Queen and Country” picks up the story a decade later when Bill (Callum Turner) is all grown up, handsome and sexy and happily swimming off his family’s private island in the Thames until unhappily drafted into the British army during the Korean War.</p>
<p>In boot camp, he meets up with soon-to-be-best-mate Percy (Caleb Landry Jones), a highly excitable troublemaker. They’ll join forces with cheeky rogue Redmond (Pat Shortt), a “skiver” — Scottish slang for scammer or slacker — who has been around in the military long enough to know the system:</p>
<p>“Everybody in the army is trying to get away with something,” Redmond teaches. “Find out what it is, and play on it.”</p>
<p>The result is an escalating battle of wits — and psychological war of attrition — with their prickly superiors: Sgt. Maj. Bradley (David Thewlis) keeps hauling them in for minor infractions, while aptly named Maj. Cross (Richard E. Grant), a Chris Walken look-alike, is constantly enraged that his beloved regimental clock (a gift from Queen Victoria) keeps getting stolen.</p>
<p>Our randy boys take time out from tormenting their officers on base to seeking love — or at least sex — off base, in the nearby town. Percy complains about slow progress with nurse Sophie (Aimee-Ffion Edwards): “It’s so tedious, having to go through all these stages — hand on bra, hand on breast....” He eventually will be drawn to Bill’s faster sister Dawn (Vanessa Kirby) on that idyllic little island in the Thames.</p>
<p>Bill, for his part, falls fast in love with the lugubriously beautiful Ophelia (Tamsin Egerton), while sitting behind her at an off-key string quartet recital. He takes her to see Kurosawa’s controversial new film “Rashomon” (with its three conflicting versions of a rape story), but she’s less enchanted by it than he is. Yes, “it can happen in different ways,” she says — “but the woman is always raped.”</p>
<p>More to the point of their own relationship: “Don’t expect anything from me,” she tells him. “I’ll disappoint you.”</p>
<p>And she’s true to her word.</p>
<p>Director Boorman’s close friendship with American tough-guy icon Lee Marvin facilitated his early Hollywood entry in films like “Point Blank” (1967) and “Hell in the Pacific” (1968), which were followed by UK hits “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977), “Excalibur” (1981) and then “Hope and Glory.” In between those came what many — including yours truly — consider his greatest picture, the shattering “Deliverance” (1972), which was Oscar-nominated both for best film and best director.</p>
<p>In “Hope and Glory,” Billy learned about sex, death, love and adult hypocrisy while wandering through the bombed-out ruins of houses in his London neighborhood, while his childlike father dreamed of glory behind a military clerk's typewriter. Here, in the fitting parallel of “Queen and Country,” Bill stands sardonically tall as the teacher in a military typing-class — until he is brought up on charges of subversion, for “seducing another soldier” out of Korea duty. It’s a political not a sexual charge, but his clueless family and the equally clueless press take it literally. (“Are you really a nancy boy?” his stepdad asks.)</p>
<p>Mr. Boorman’s delicious script features monologues like the following, from roguish Redmond: “The army trains you to get out of the trenches and walk straight toward people shooting at you. You’ve got to find a way to stay in the trenches. You have to be brave to be that cowardly.”</p>
<p>The performances are generally delightful, though the officers are pretty much Monty Python in nature, and Ms. Edgerton as Ophelia doesn’t do much for me — she’s a semi-fatal weak link in the casting.</p>
<p>Mr. Boorman’s photographic sense is exquisite, as always, and so is his sensibility: The family’s installing of that newfangled thing, a TV — in order to see QE2’s coronation — is hilarious. (“Windsor is a necktie knot, not a royal family,” grumbles grampa during the ceremony.)</p>
<p>Pardon my morbidity, but this might well be 82-year-old Mr. Boorman’s last film. It is not so riveting or satisfying as “Hope and Glory” (how can you top the Blitz for action?) but it’s totally charming and evocative of its time and place, and fab Anglophile fun to watch.</p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Fri, 10 Apr 2015 15:38:51 +0000268 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/queen-and-country-charmingly-captures-english-life-in-the-1950s#comments'Kumiko' pays homage to 'Fargo'http://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/kumiko-pays-homage-to-fargo
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/kumiko1.jpg" title="Rinko Kikuchi stars in the movie &quot;Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter.&quot;" class="colorbox" rel="gallery-269"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/kumiko1.jpg" alt="" title="Rinko Kikuchi stars in the movie &quot;Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter.&quot;" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>Kumiko is a stranger in a strange land and in the equally strange movie that bears her name.</p>
<p>At work in Tokyo, she’s an “Office Lady” for Mr. Sakagami, a Clarence Thomas-type boss, who seems to be pushing a sexual agenda even while instructing her to buy an anniversary present for his wife.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">“What kind of present?” asks Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi).</span></p>
<p>“I really don’t care,” replies Mr. Sakagami (Nobuyuki Katsube), adding, “You appear to have an increasingly poor disposition.”</p>
<p>Indeed, she’s a sullen sad-sack, with raggedy hair and a seriously depressed (some would say zombie-fied) demeanor — reminiscent of Bartleby the Scrivener and other downtrodden drones. While the other office girls happily chatter about perming their eyelashes, Kumiko chafes under her mother’s remonstrances: “Why don’t you answer your phone? Did you get that promotion yet? Are you dating anyone? Why don’t you move back home with me and save money till you get married?”</p>
<p>But Kumiko, as the title suggests, is hunting for treasure, not a husband, and thinks she discovers it at the outset in the form of a battered old VHS copy of the Coen brothers’ film “Fargo” (1996). Watching it repeatedly, she becomes convinced that the suitcase of stolen cash buried by Steve Buscemi in fictional North Dakota is real. Armed with her belief in “the untold riches of America” — and a crudely stitched treasure map — she quits her suffocating situation in Tokyo and embarks on a quixotic quest to the Minnesota tundra in search of her mythical fortune.</p>
<p>Maverick indie director-writers David and Nathan Zellner have an idiosyncratic sense of humor to match their idiosyncratic narratives. Their “Kid-Thing” (2012) was widely hailed as “the best undistributed film not playing at a theater near you.” Their debut movie “Goliath” (2008) concerned a missing cat by that name.</p>
<p>The Zellners’ fascination with animals manifests itself here with Kumiko’s beloved pet rabbit Bunzo, whom she feeds Ramen noodles via chopsticks. Similarly deadpan — and amusing — is the scene in which she screws up her precious VHS “Fargo” tape and ends up ceremoniously dumping it all down the toilet.</p>
<p>Once in America? “Free Tourist Information” scammers at the Minneapolis airport lead her to a tour bus that breaks down and a good Minnesota Samaritan who wonders if she ever read “Shogun”?</p>
<p>Talk about language barrier. Kumiko could barely even communicate in Japanese back home, let alone English here in the frigid Midwest. Her one-word vocabulary consists of “Fargo.”</p>
<p>Ms. Kikuchi (Oscar-nominated for her 2006 role in “Babel”) delivers a soulful performance, with a descent into mania that pulls us slowly but deeply into her world. The revelations behind her doleful, downcast eyes make her intriguing as she marches through the snow — in a motel-blanket poncho — to her peculiarly different drummer.</p>
<p>Director David Zellner himself does a fine turn as an empathetic sheriff’s deputy who tries to help her but gets ditched at a roadside truck stop — the Pump &amp; Munch.</p>
<p>It’s a kind of philosophical essay, actually — a beautifully photographed road movie with extended long shots, little dialogue and a soundtrack that won a special Sundance prize for the mysteriously evocative score by Austin band Octopus Project.</p>
<p>“Kumiko” was inspired by the “true story” (or urban legend?) of Takako Konishi, a Japanese woman who believed the “based on a true story” title at the beginning of “Fargo,” went looking for the money and was found dead in a frozen Minnesota field in 2001. It’s both tragic and whimsical: Is Kumiko just naive or really deranged, like the Spanish conquistadors in Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” (1972)?</p>
<p>The slick ending doesn’t quite answer that. This is the Zellner brothers’ homage to the Coen brothers, and you have to be a fan of (or at least to have seen) “Fargo” to appreciate it. Folklore has its own cosmic truth. Literal truth, less so. Obsessive, foolhardy quests are rare these days. There are fewer and fewer uncharted places left in the world.</p>
<p>All very profound.</p>
<p>But I can’t help wondering, what if Kumiko had found an old videotape of “Monty Python &amp; the Holy Grail” instead of “Fargo”?</p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Fri, 03 Apr 2015 04:00:00 +0000269 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/kumiko-pays-homage-to-fargo#comments'Wild Tales' just that plus a cathartic jolthttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/wild-tales-just-that-plus-a-cathartic-jolt
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/wildtales1.jpg" title="Erica Rivas as Romina and Diego Gentile as Ariel in the &quot;Till Death Do Us Part&quot; segment of the movie &quot;Wild Tales.&quot;" class="colorbox" rel="gallery-270"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/wildtales1.jpg" alt="" title="Erica Rivas as Romina and Diego Gentile as Ariel in the &quot;Till Death Do Us Part&quot; segment of the movie &quot;Wild Tales.&quot;" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>“Anybody asks you what the sweetest thing in life is, you tell ’em it’s revenge!” snarls Paul Lazzaro, obsessed with killing Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s great “Slaughterhouse Five.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">Lazzaro has nothing on the subjects of “Wild Tales,” Argentina’s 2015 Oscar-nominated best foreign film entry, which consists of six stories about people in stress and distress — all bent on, or in need of, revenge. “Twilight Zone” meets Alfred Hitchcock and “Creepshow” — somewhere between drama and black comedy — in director-writer Damián Szifrón’s stunning anthology. Some of his tall tales are better than others.</span></p>
<p>Fasten your seatbelts for the first one, “Pasternak,” set on an airplane that takes off even before the opening credits. It’s going to be a bumpy ride for the passengers, including Pasternak’s ex-girlfriend Isabel, who cheated on him with his best friend. She is coincidentally seated across the aisle from a music critic who, come to find out, trashed and ruined Pasternak as a composer. More coincidence: Their conversation is overheard and joined by the Home Depot supervisor (“where that psycho worked for a while”) who fired Pasternak. And a few rows back sits the shrink who gave up on him.</p>
<p>Seems that Pasternak was terrible at everything, and that everybody was terrible to him in return. Imagine their horror when his voice comes over the intercom from the cockpit ....</p>
<p>Story No. 2 — “Rats” — takes place in a dingy roadside diner on a dark and stormy night. Guy comes in. “Table for one?” asks waitress Moza politely. “I see you're good at math,” he replies. What a jerk, huh? More than a jerk, he turns out to be the Mafioso thug who repossessed her family’s house, seduced her mother, and prompted her father’s suicide. He deserves to die. Moza doesn’t have the nerve to take action. But her empathetic cook does .…</p>
<p>The film’s third segment — “Road to Hell” — is its piece de resistance. The cool George Clooney-clone driver (Leonardo Sbaraglia) of a cool, brand-new sports car is stuck behind a slow junker that keeps lane-changing and thwarting his every attempt to pass. Finally, the hot shot manages to overtake and — with shouted insults and raised middle finger — leave the slow poke in the dust.</p>
<p>Ah ... but then comes Mr. Sbaraglia’s flat tire — with turning tables and escalating violence. As both cars crash over a hillside, Siri’s voice calmly says “recalculating …” and we watch things reach their blissfully horrendous apocalypse. It’s reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s great TV feature debut “Duel,” only much darker. The moral? Stay behind, not in front, of your road-rage enemy.</p>
<p>The fourth story, “Bombita,” opens with professional engineer Simon imploding a huge grain elevator and, in a cell phone call to his wife, promising to be home by 5 p.m. with his daughter’s birthday cake. Best-laid plans … His car has been towed in the interim, and he loses his argument with a tow company that’s subcontracted by the government to collect and get its cut from fines. Simon, the hapless citizen, is told he has two options: Pay and relax, or have a heart attack. Simon, the skilled technician, finds a third way .…</p>
<p>The final tale, “Til Death Do Us Part,” is, well — to die for. The gloriously ritzy wedding party for Romina (Erica Rivas) and Ariel (Diego Gentile) is attended by “all of my friends from the country club and Facebook,” says the bride. All is well until she catches the groom making eyes at an ex-lover and — fueled by an excess of champagne — seeks serious vengeance. This episode combines Fellini-esque with Czech tragicomedy for exhilarating results.</p>
<p>Director Szifrón’s credits include several popular, offbeat Spanish-Argentine TV cop-action series, infused with cartoonishly rowdy violence — a little Pedro Almodóvar here, a little Quentin Tarantino there — with smart, stylish scripts that manage to be funny, sad, absurd and relevant at the same time. Each final knockout punch in the “Wild Tales” vignettes lands with a fury, thanks to Mr. Szifron’s superb editing.</p>
<p>It’s all about catharsis and “the undeniable pleasure of losing control,” he says — so diabolically satisfying when you’re so mad as hell.</p>
<p>Check it out.</p>
<p>In Spanish with English subtitles. Opens today at the Manor Theater, Squirrel Hill.</p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Fri, 27 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000270 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/wild-tales-just-that-plus-a-cathartic-jolt#commentsWallace Shawn plays Ibsen's womanizing architect in 'A Master Builder'http://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/wallace-shawn-plays-ibsens-womanizing-architect-in-a-master-builder
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/cmu3-1.jpg" title="Wallace Shawn and Lisa Joyce star in &quot;A Master Builder,&quot; to screen at the CMU International Film Festival." class="colorbox" rel="gallery-272"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/cmu3-1.jpg" alt="" title="Wallace Shawn and Lisa Joyce star in &quot;A Master Builder,&quot; to screen at the CMU International Film Festival." /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>It's been a long time -- 33 years, to be exact -- since actor Wallace Shawn and director Andre Gregory famously dined in front of a camera. Now, if not quite by popular demand, they're together again thanks to Henrik Ibsen and Jonathan Demme.</p>
<p>Ibsen's "A Master Builder" -- directed by Mr. Demme and featuring the two stars of "My Dinner With Andre" -- opens the ninth annual CMU International Film Festival tonight in high fashion, appropriate to its theme this year, "Faces of Work."</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">Nobody ever worked harder than Solness (Mr. Shawn) to get where he is -- the pinnacle of success as a great architect. But did he get there honestly? Did he undercut old Brovik (Mr. Gregory), who gave him his start? And has he been sabotaging the career of Brovik's son Ragnar (Jeff Biehl) along the way?</span></p>
<p>Of more prurient interest, Solness has been having a hot affair with Ragnar's fiancee Kaja (Emily Cass McDonnell), under Ragnar's clueless nose -- if noses may be said to be clueless. Mrs. Solness (Julie Hagerty) knows, or at least suspects, everything. But her manipulative, egomaniacal hubby keeps running roughshod over everybody.</p>
<p>He builds tall buildings. He occupies the height of his profession.</p>
<p>His Achilles heel?</p>
<p>He's afraid of heights.</p>
<p>After a lifetime of bullying his wife, employees and mistresses alike, he now wants to make peace. But along comes sexy, angelic Hilde (Lisa Joyce) to unhinge both his agony and ecstasy -- as well as his planned escape route from here to eternity.</p>
<p>Mr. Gregory, who staged "Master Builder" in New York 14 years ago, found its previous translations replete with brilliant passages plus "completely incomprehensible and boring" ones. Mr. Shawn volunteered to retranslate it -- although he spoke not a word of Norwegian. Mr. Demme described that process in a phone interview with me this week:</p>
<p>"Wally had the original text blown up large, then he had a Norwegian translator write the synonyms [of key words] in the margins. He picked the ones he liked best and, with certain cuts and changes of emphasis, did his own translation and screenplay."</p>
<p>It is, overall, very faithful to Ibsen, except for a dubious hospital framing device. But conveying the play's difficult dialogue to a live audience from a theater stage vs. an unseen viewer from an intimate film set requires wholly different acting styles.</p>
<p>In that regard, the performances elicited here by Mr. Demme are superb -- as we might expect from the man whose "Silence of the Lambs" generated five Oscars. Mr. Shawn's casting in the title role, however, is problematic as well as brilliant. He is deliciously slimy, lying, rationalizing and devastating everyone around him before cheerfully dispatching them until the next occasion for their abuse. I love his bad-taste-in-the-mouth pronunciation of "RAG-nar!" -- like Seinfeld's "NEW-man!" -- whenever he's forced to utter the name.</p>
<p>But as a super-sexed womanizer, holding three beauties mesmerized for life? Ibsen describes Solness as an imposing middle-aged man, "strong and vigorous, with close-cropped curly hair, dark moustache and thick dark eyebrows." Short, bald Wally Shawn? With his charming but not exactly erotic lisp?</p>
<p>No way he's gonna drive women crazy.</p>
<p>"But he captured the magnitude of the guy -- the intellectual," said Mr. Demme. He's right about that. But I once saw the late great Dame Judith Anderson play Hamlet. She was riveting and unforgettable. But she was not Hamlet.</p>
<p>Talk about "problem" plays. There's a lot of autobiographical stuff here in the issues Ibsen was trying to work out. "A Doll's House," at least, was resolved. As Stella Adler put it: "When Nora walked out at the end, the whole world heard the door slam."</p>
<p>"A Master Builder," on the contrary, raises a hundred questions and leaves us to supply the answers. "If Ragnar rises, I go down," says Solness. His fear of the younger generation pushing him aside is worse than (or the same as) his fear of death itself.</p>
<p>Mr. Demme, like Louis Malle, takes a spare, minimalist, straightforward approach to his material and gets out of the way of it. There is enormous intelligence and artistic integrity in his effort. He largely employs a play of the eyes: Brovik's tearful, hopeless, despairing old eyes; Ragnar's huge, hysterical eyes; Kaja's constantly terrified eyes; Mrs. Solness' mad, tear-stained eyes; sexy Hilde's eyes of a Lolita-like nymphet -- and the nervous tensions between and among all of them.</p>
<p>Ingmar Bergman meets Tennessee Williams, in a way. Mr. Demme shoots almost all of it in tight close-ups, occasionally zooming for emphasis.</p>
<p>Among the sublime-to-ridiculous answers of those 100 questions is Mr. Gregory's: He calls "A Master Builder" a meditation on finding grace "just as the clock is about to strike midnight" and you realize that "the last great creative adventure is dying in a positive way."</p>
<p>H.L. Mencken, on the other hand, said the play's most profound, bottom-line meaning is: "That a man of 55 or 60 is an ass to fall in love with a flapper of 17."</p>
<p>The truth probably lies somewhere in between. You have to see this challenging Jonathan Demme film and decide for yourself exactly where.</p>
<p><em>"A Master Builder" screens at 7:15 tonight only at the Regent Square Theater. Director Jonathan Demme will attend the opening-night reception. Admission: $20; $10 students and seniors.</em></p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Tue, 17 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000272 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/wallace-shawn-plays-ibsens-womanizing-architect-in-a-master-builder#comments'Secret Sharer' skillfully blends mutiny, murder and romancehttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/secret-sharer-skillfully-blends-mutiny-murder-and-romance
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/cmu4.jpg" title="Jack Laskey plays Konrad and Zhu Zhu plays Li in &quot;Secret Sharer,&quot; playing at the CMU International Film Festival." class="colorbox" rel="gallery-271"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/cmu4.jpg" alt="" title="Jack Laskey plays Konrad and Zhu Zhu plays Li in &quot;Secret Sharer,&quot; playing at the CMU International Film Festival." /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>It’s just a noisy old rust-bucket cargo ship in the South China Sea, but Konrad is the proud young Polish captain of it — unexpectedly promoted to his first command by the boat’s wealthy Chinese owner. As he arrives to take charge, it feels like the first day of school. There’s something strange about it, but why question your good fortune?</p>
<p>He’d know why if he knew he was in a Joseph Conrad story, “The Secret Sharer,” whose Oscar-winning director Peter Fudakowski will appear here at its Saturday night screening during the Carnegie Mellon University International Film Festival.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">Jack Laskey plays the handsome, guileless hero, who is greeted with closed arms by his motley Chinese crew from the start. They suspect him and the rich, unscrupulous Boss of planning to scuttle the ship for an insurance scam. The crew members don’t just work on the ship, they live there: It’s their home as well as livelihoods that are at stake.</span></p>
<p>Tensions quickly escalate from disrespect to disobedience to outright mutiny. Against Konrad’s orders, his sailors abandon ship for unapproved “shore leave,” leaving the young captain impotently alone and helpless, anchored in a bay. Stranded and fretting on deck that night, he spots a naked body in the water below, tangled up in the ship's rope ladder. Upon pulling it up, he finds a naked Chinese woman — a kind of gorgeous bedraggled mermaid named Li (Zhu Zhu) — and drags her on board. She just has time enough to say "Hide me!" before fainting nakedly against his naked chest.</p>
<p>Konrad takes her to his cabin, where she recuperates — also nakedly. He seems to travel almost as lightly as she does: For the duration, they’ve got exactly one shirt and pair of pants between them. One or the other is thus topless or bottomless all the time.</p>
<p>Dawn comes soon after, and so does a search party from a nearby ship, trying to find a murderer.</p>
<p>“We are looking for a woman,” says the officer.</p>
<p>“Aren’t we all?” says Konrad, with a nervous chuckle.</p>
<p>He’ll be keeping her presence a secret from them and from his own hostile crew (when they deign to return), secretly sharing his food — and love — with her until a very tricky escape plan can be concocted and attempted for all concerned.</p>
<p>A little refresher info for you here: The great novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was really Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski, born in Russian-occupied Poland. Polish was his first language, French his second, but after immigrating to London he wrote — brilliantly — in English. His “thing” was psychological realism, his action often set in maritime situations. He was very reticent about sexual subjects, rarely writing about them and regarding sex in general as more often a matter of dishonor than of a healthy relationship.</p>
<p>I tell you this as prelude to telling you the most shocking thing about the film at hand: Conrad’s escaped murderer has been changed from male to female!</p>
<p>It’s almost like changing the opening of “Moby Dick” to “Call me Isabel.”</p>
<p>Well, OK — director-writer Fudakowski says the film is “inspired by” — not “based on” —“The Secret Sharer.” But, even so, it’s a pretty audacious switch.</p>
<p>He’s an audacious guy. He won an Academy Award for best foreign film of 2005 as producer of “Tsotsi,” the Athol Fugard novel of a teenage thug in Johannesburg who hijacks a car, finds a baby on the back seat, and takes it home to his slum.</p>
<p>The performances here are wonderful. Mr. Laskey evolves from wimpy to empowered; Ms. Zhu Zhu from suicidal to attitudinal, with a vaguely American accent that accessorizes her sense of mystery. The sullen crew members are individually and collectively excellent.</p>
<p>Guy Farley’s fine original score is complemented by nifty Caribbean tunes (the captain — in private — prefers Cuban music and cigars), while Mr. Fudakowski’s camera lingers dreamily on the shimmering sea and seductive body of Zhu Zhu. One beautiful shot of the lovers lying upside-down on a white bed remarkably resembles Annie Leibovitz’s iconic Rolling Stone cover of John and Yoko.</p>
<p>Conrad probably wouldn’t like it, but he’s not here to complain.</p>
<p><em>In English and Mandarin with subtitles. Screens Saturday only, at 7:15 p.m., in CMU’s McConomy Auditorium.</em></p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Tue, 17 Mar 2015 04:00:00 +0000271 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/secret-sharer-skillfully-blends-mutiny-murder-and-romance#comments'Leviathan' delves into the stark realities of life in a Russian fishing townhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/leviathan-delves-into-the-stark-realities-of-life-in-a-russian-fishing-town
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/leviathan1.jpg" title="Sergey Pokhodaev as Roma in &quot;Leviathan,&quot; where a dead whale proves symbolic." class="colorbox" rel="gallery-274"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/leviathan1.jpg" alt="" title="Sergey Pokhodaev as Roma in &quot;Leviathan,&quot; where a dead whale proves symbolic." /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>Everybody and everything is vodka-saturated in “Leviathan,” Russia’s Oscar-nominated foreign film entry for 2015.</p>
<p>Celebrating? Mourning? Fighting? Making love? Discussing legal strategy around the kitchen table? Whatever the occasion, “Let’s drink!” is the invocation for these folks, who regularly put away something close to a Smirnoff-Stoli warehouse. They and their inebriation and their situation have humorous moments — but mostly not, in director-writer Andrey Zvyagintsev’s bitterly cynical reworking of the Book of Job.</p>
<p>It takes place in a once-thriving, now-crumbling northwest Russian fishing town on the Barents Sea, where Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov), his young wife, Lilya (Elena Liadova), and his sullen teenage son, Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev), from a previous marriage live in a sprawling seaside property that has been owned by Kolya’s family for generations.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">But these days it has suddenly become prime real estate, and the local mayor, a corrupt thug named Vadim (Roman Madianov), wants to expropriate it for a lucrative development scheme.</span></p>
<p>What to do? Kolya summons his old Army buddy Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), now a hot-shot Moscow lawyer, to defend his land and collect dirt on the mayor. They win the first battle or two...if not the war.</p>
<p>“Leviathan’s” wonderful title references three things: (1) the sea monster in the biblical Job story, (2) the skeleton of a beached whale in Kolya’s seaside village, and (3) Thomas Hobbes’ seminal book — written in 1651 during the English Civil War — with its ominous argument for constitutional order in the form of a social contract between commoners and an absolute sovereign.</p>
<p>Hobbes saw the state as Leviathan, indeed — a monster created by man to prevent “the war of all against all.” We’re all born into a religious “state” of original sin and a government “state” — neither of which we chose or agreed to. The (theoretical) social deal says we get security in exchange for freedom. The problem comes when we and the system come into conflict — a longtime Dostoyevskian theme in Russian and worldwide literature.</p>
<p>Director Zvyagintsev masterfully renders both the humor and the horror of this dilemma. In one scene early on, a judge rattles out the words of her ruling (against Kolya, in favor of Mayor Vadim) faster than the final side-effects disclaimer of a Viagra ad. In another extraordinary scene — a “birthday shooting party” by the sea — the wives cook while the menfolk, drunk and armed to the teeth, fire at targets that include framed portraits of former Soviet leaders.</p>
<p>“Leviathan” is graced by the wrenchingly naturalistic performances of characters whose relationships evolve in subtly significant ways: Dmitri and Lilya sleep together; Lilya’s conflicted desperation mounts; spitfire Roma spends nights hanging out with pals in the ruins of an old church, learning how to drink. Father and son have a mutually tough, rough love.</p>
<p>“Will you ever stop drinking?” Roma asks.</p>
<p>“Tomorrow,” Kolya replies.</p>
<p>Their no-nonsense neighbor Angela issues an order: “Don’t drink so much!”</p>
<p>“I won’t,” Kolya promises.</p>
<p>“Good,” she answers — and then pours hefty drinks all around.</p>
<p>Mr. Zvyagintsev’s powerful voice is fueled by his angry, sardonic contempt for the soul-crushing corruption that infects Russian culture — and a helluva lot of others. His previous masterwork “Elena” (2011) was a similarly provocative film-noir tale of Putin-era Russia in which a wealthy technocrat leaves his fortune to a spoiled-brat daughter — played by the same Elena Liadova who steals the show here.</p>
<p>Both gripping, downbeat films take place in the moral vacuum of Russia’s Cowardly New World, where the dubious gifts of capitalism have yet to trickle down.</p>
<p>Mr. Zvyagintsev points his finger at everybody — but especially the unholy alliance between the Russian Orthodox church and the political bureaucracy.</p>
<p>The sleazy mayor and his local priest enjoy a very useful, amicable relationship. One day over tea, Vadim begins, “What happened was — ”</p>
<p>The priest cuts him off: “Don’t reveal anything to me. You’re not at confession. You and I may be working for the same cause. But you’ve got your territory, and I’ve got mine.”</p>
<p>Gorgeous, solemn Philip Glass music opens and closes the film. Otherwise, silence enhances all 140 minutes of its gritty realism. This fascinating if difficult director never caters to his viewers. Neither does his terrific, stark cinematography of dead boats, dead buildings, dead whales — skeletal remains of all — with a final bulldozer chomping away, like some Jurassic Park dinosaur, at Kolya’s beautiful old home.</p>
<p>We’re left, as we began, with waves smashing against rocks, chipping away at them and at the endless suffering of simple folks like Kolya.</p>
<p>Even Job got a better deal. Nowadays, there are countless tales like Kolya’s, in and out of Russia. All ages and habitations are ripe for the wrecking.</p>
<p>(In Russian with English subtitles. Opens today at the Harris Theater, Downtown, through Wednesday only.)</p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Wed, 04 Mar 2015 05:00:00 +0000274 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/leviathan-delves-into-the-stark-realities-of-life-in-a-russian-fishing-town#comments'Focus' entertaining, but good pieces don't make satisfying wholehttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/focus-entertaining-but-good-pieces-dont-make-satisfying-whole
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/focus3-1.jpg" title="Will Smith as Nicky and Margot Robbie as Jess both share an interest in grifting in &quot;Focus.&quot;" class="colorbox" rel="gallery-276"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/focus3-1.jpg" alt="" title="Will Smith as Nicky and Margot Robbie as Jess both share an interest in grifting in &quot;Focus.&quot;" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>Nicky Spurgeon runs a kind of Academy of Con Arts and Sciences. The arts involve sleight-of-hand and misdirection. The science is getting people to trust you.</p>
<p>It’s all a matter of “Focus,” says Nicky (Will Smith), himself a master grifter, who takes amateur con Jess (Margot Robbie) under his wing, as well as his sheets, and supplies her with insightful tricks of the trade: “The brain is very predictable. It’s slow and can’t really multitask. Tap him here, take from there ...”</p>
<p>With that promising premise, writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa serve up a hybrid advertised as a comedy, drama, crime story and romance — one or two genres too many, vying with each other to find a balance or to see which one wins.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">After a stylish opening gambit in snowy Manhattan, the “Focus” locus shifts to New Orleans, where Nicky’s gang executes a nifty job in a beautifully choreographed sequence set during Mardi Gras: The cameras capture a whole team of con artists as they steal their way through the drunken crowds. So much simultaneous activity, so smoothly edited.</span></p>
<p>We get the clear idea, at this point, that the film is going to be an ensemble affair, with a virtual repertory company full of interesting skimmers at work and even more of them in a secret warehouse afterward, counting and divvying up the loot. We also get the clear idea that Nick and Jess have graduated from Just Sex to True Romance.</p>
<p>Ah, but being a professional liar/cheater is hazardous to the health of your love life, and just when these lovers are celebrating their Fat Tuesday take, he ditches her.</p>
<p>Cut to Buenos Aires, three years later. Nicky is there for a multimillion-dollar racetrack confidence scam he has long been plotting. Suddenly Jess shows up — a sadder but wiser femme fatale — to mess with his plans and his head.</p>
<p>Messrs. Ficarra and Requa (makers of the spotty but fascinating “I Love You Phillip Morris” and “Crazy, Stupid, Love”) are more adept at writing and rendering certain central set-piece situations than at unifying the whole.</p>
<p>Aside from the Mardi Gras scenes, the film’s best sequence depicts Nicky giving in to his gambling addiction in an escalating series of bets against a wealthy Asian (BD Wong), whose deep pockets invite deeper pickpockets to come.</p>
<p>There’s some occasionally funny dialogue. (“Where are all the black people?” yells drunken Nick in a casino.) There are some nice plot twists early on, and some totally preposterous ones later.</p>
<p>The Smith-Robbie pairing works fairly well overall, but excessive “Focus” on the goo-goo eyes and softcore sex fails to make them more compelling or convince us they’re ever in any real peril. Their backstory is largely nonexistent. Yet Mr. Smith’s natural charm (plenty left over from “The Pursuit of Happyness” and “Ali”) makes for nice chemistry with Ms. Robbie’s breathless sexuality. She has bad-hair moments and doesn't go nude here, the way she did as Leo DiCaprio’s druggy girl/wife in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but she looks invariably ravishing in a bikini.</p>
<p>Suffice to say that together, tumbling in and out of a lotta hotel beds, they keep the maids busy and are so good at deception that they themselves don’t quite know when they’re manipulating each other and when they’re for real.</p>
<p>Good supporting cast includes Rodrigo Santoro as Nicky’s Argentine “mark” and Gerald McRaney as his menacing henchman. But the weird thing is, all but one of the captivating characters introduced in the early Mardi Gras scene disappear thereafter. The exception is Adrian Martinez as Nick’s funny fat friend Farhad, who always says he’s “doing a cleanse” and supplies most of the comedy. Were the writer-directors afraid to risk overshadowing Mr. Smith and Ms. Robbie with a real ensemble? I don’t know, but it’s a shame — the lost script opportunity to fit the minor players into the major con game.</p>
<p>Final kvetch: The magic sleight-of-hand moments are indicated (through misdirection) but never actually shown. The studio boasts Apollo Robbins (“The Gentleman Thief”) as its official consultant for those scenes. So why didn’t they give us at least a single good demonstration of how a fast-moving professional pickpocket removes a watch with one hand? I mean the pickpocket’s hand, not the watch’s hand.</p>
<p>Oh, never mind.</p>
<p>The hocus-pocus of “Focus” always seems to be just outside of the camera's range. All in all, it’s entertaining. It won’t hold you spellbound or remain with you as hauntingly universal thereafter. But it’s not the worst two hours you could spend in a warm movie theater in frigid February.</p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em><br />
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</div></div></div></div></div>Wed, 25 Feb 2015 05:00:00 +0000276 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/focus-entertaining-but-good-pieces-dont-make-satisfying-whole#comments'Mr. Turner' delivers superb acting, filmmakinghttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/mr-turner-delivers-superb-acting-filmmaking
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><a href="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/1000px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/mrturner1.jpg" title="Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner in the film &quot;Mr. Turner.&quot;" class="colorbox" rel="gallery-279"><img src="http://www.barryparis.com/sites/default/files/styles/360px_wide/public/_uploads_cck/field_image/mrturner1.jpg" alt="" title="Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner in the film &quot;Mr. Turner.&quot;" /></a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item odd"><p><strong><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">By Barry Paris / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</span></strong></p>
<p>Revolutionary artists rarely have an easy time of it, and rarely give those around them an easy time, while typically reveling in the turmoil they cause. I’ve thought about Beethoven and Picasso in that regard. But I’m now thinking about J.M.W. Turner, and so will you if you treat yourself to Mike Leigh’s stunningly beautiful biopic, “Mr. Turner.”</p>
<p><span style="font-size: 13.0080003738403px; line-height: 1.538em;">Timothy Spall occupies — no, devours — the title role of that visionary British painter (1775-1851), whose eccentric personality and wildly original landscapes and seascapes captivated early Victorians.</span></p>
<p>He has a lower lip on which eagles could perch.</p>
<p>He straps himself to a ship’s mast in a storm so he can later paint the full power and violence of nature.</p>
<p>Being financially secure, he visits aristocrats or brothels, depending on his mood.</p>
<p>He lives with his doting barber-father and studio assistant William Turner Sr. — aka “Daddy,” sweetly played by Paul Jesson — for the bulk of both their lives.</p>
<p>All the while, he is watched over by his fanatically devoted housekeeper Hannah (Dorothy Atkinson), who lurks around corners and silently attends to his every need — sex included — with nary a nod or thank-you for her efforts. To complicate things, Hannah’s aunt (Ruth Sheen) periodically shows up in a quivering rage: She’s the mother of Turner’s two illegitimate daughters, whose existence he denies.</p>
<p>The artist was, in fact, stimulated by everybody and everything. There’s a wonderfully funny scene in which he discovers — and poses for — a daguerreotype photo. Other fine sequences involve his skirmishes with the pitiful artist Benjamin Robert Haydon (Martin Savage), an eventual suicide; with foppish critic John Ruskin; and with his hated rival John Constable.</p>
<p>But the film’s best moments depict his chaotic painting techniques — spitting, battering, attacking, violating the canvases, creating fiery sunsets in “proto-psychedelic” pigments — many of which have since faded. He elevated landscape painting from insipid to profound and, as Romanticism’s precursor to Impressionism, had a huge impact on the later likes of Monet. By the end of his life, his paintings became astonishingly abstract.</p>
<p>Director-screenwriter Mr. Leigh’s past work includes the gorgeous Gilbert &amp; Sullivan biopic “Topsy-Turvy” (1999) and the powerful “Vera Drake” (2004). All of his films are characterized by impeccable attention to detail, in production and set and costume design. His scripts defy traditional structure, exploring idiosyncrasies rather than building to stock climaxes. Here, as ever, Mr. Leigh deals with big human-artistic issues via small, extraordinary moments.</p>
<p>Befitting the subject, Dick Pope’s sumptuous cinematography is on a David Lean epic level, matching the Turner canvases whose creation it illuminates, from the first exquisite opening shot of a Dutch windmill, with two girls’ bodies and voices slowly fading in, as Turner paints. Mr. Pope somehow bridges the gap between painting and photography in the light, texture and composition of every frame — “the sun at crepuscular time of day,” as Turner says, or the special light at Margate.</p>
<p>That photography has earned an Oscar nomination — as have Gary Yershon’s excellent musical score and the production and costume designs. But why not the acting?</p>
<p>Mr. Spall’s performance is nothing short of colossal — with his piercing stare and that terrifying lower lip! Grunting, growling, snorting, stomping through the film with periodic emotional explosions — it’s a scenery-chewing tour de force, perfectly leavened by vulnerability. At times, his Turner looks and sounds almost like Quasimodo. It’s a role he was born to play and, at director Leigh’s request, he spent two years learning how to paint in preparation for it.</p>
<p>Ms. Atkinson nearly steals the show as poor Hannah, long-suffering — literally — from a terrible, scrofulous skin disease that made her life physically as well as psychologically agonizing. Marion Bailey as the charming seaside landlady with whom Turner falls in love is a complementary joy.</p>
<p>Mr. Leigh deserves special kudos for all the wonderful interplay, subtexts and sexual tensions going on among minor characters — people on boats, bored audience members at lectures, “extras” we’ll never see more than once — who are always reacting to the larger action. That helps the inordinate 2½-hour running time of “Mr. Turner” seem to go by in a flash.</p>
<p>And “Mr. Turner,” by the way, has helped generate a new interest in Turner's works: His “Rome, From Mount Aventine” (1835) recently sold at Sotheby’s auction for $47 million — the record for a British artist.</p>
<p>These words from Marcel Proust are supremely relevant to Turner:</p>
<p>“Everything great in our world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all that they have suffered to enrich us. We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.”</p>
<p><em>Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris: <a href="mailto:parispg48@aol.com">parispg48@aol.com</a>.</em></p>
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</div></div></div></div></div>Thu, 19 Feb 2015 05:00:00 +0000279 at http://www.barryparis.comhttp://www.barryparis.com/movie-reviews/mr-turner-delivers-superb-acting-filmmaking#comments